This paper deals with the connections between historical injury and temporality in two transitional scenarios, and explores how the National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995 and the Justice and Peace Law of 2005 ‘articulate’ particular conceptions of ‘violence’ as well as conceive the prospect of an imagined new future. I argue that in trying to grasp the multiple dimensions of violence through different mechanisms, collective languages instituted by State-sponsored laws that seek ‘national reconciliation’ fail to render intelligible—at the very (...) moment of their enunciation into a legal language—the structural dimensions of violence that are at the root of conflict itself. In this regard, the text concentrates on the ways in which difference and inequality—despite the promise of the newness reiterated by Transitional Justice paradigms—are woven together into a longue durée that lies beyond the theoretical contours and the technical mandates defined by and inherent to these laws. (shrink)

This introduction to our special section of Human Rights Review on Reparations and Peacebuilding gives an overview of the challenges currently confronting both peacebuilding and reparations. The special section aims to explore the relationship between these two mechanisms and examines the role that reparations schemes can play in salving or exacerbating conflict.

I examine some of the main philosophical, conceptual and normative issues in Colleen Murphy’s recent book The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (2017). I am sceptical whether we need yet another theory of justice to fit particular ‘transitional circumstances’, as Murphy argues. Instead, before presenting an alternative normative, ‘moral’ theory, we need to re-examine the very concept of transitional justice. I examine particularly the following. Firstly, what we really mean by ‘transitional justice’ in various contexts; and I argue that transitional (...) justice is not, as Murphy argues, ‘a special kind of justice’ needed during certain periods of political and social change. Transitional justice is rather an escape route from difficult questions of justice that transitional societies must deal with to maintain the delicate balance between justice and peace. Currently, the concept of transitional justice refers most directly to the overarching and expanding ‘toolkit’ of various mechanisms and processes used in post-conflict reconstruction. It is not quite clear how this toolkit fits with current debates on global, international, regional and local justice. Indeed, I would have preferred that Murphy focus on the complex conceptual foundations of transitional justice, rather than build a theory that conceptually and foundationally remains complex and ambiguous. (shrink)

Colleen Murphy’s impressive book presents a unified theory of transitional justice as a single, novel, distinct kind of justice, intended to guide normative evaluation of the choices transitional societies make in dealing with the past. I raise three central challenges to Murphy’s theory. First, how do we know that transitional justice is fundamentally a single special kind of justice that permits a grand unified theory? Second, is it plausible to hold, as Murphy claims, that societal transformation is the overarching aim (...) or objective of transitional justice? Third, is transitional justice convincingly explained as pursuing societal transformation ‘through’ or ‘by’ dealing with past wrongdoing? I argue that Murphy’s ambitious and finely detailed account does not fully reckon with dissensus about transitional justice in the field and does not adequately defend the central claim that transitional justice aims at societal transformation to be pursued by responding to past wrongs. (shrink)

This article examines how the urban planning system in Northern Ireland served to concentrate segregation and systemic inequalities during the course of the recent conflict. Using documents recently uncovered from the Northern Ireland Public Record Office, this article will show how the security forces ‘cut with the grain’ of a planning system that had historically been predicated upon segregation and exclusion in order to better control and manage politically motivated violence leaving a divided city in which systemic inequalities have been (...) built into the fabric of the urban environment. Drawing on developments within regulatory theory this article will outline a way forward for creating an integrated post-conflict planning agenda for Belfast that takes account of the limits of traditional forms of legalism and adds learning to the debate around the relationship between systemic inequalities and the process of conflict transformation. (shrink)